Blog for Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr at GarageGames.com

More on The Story of Gamer Zone

Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr — 2008-10-13T01:18:21+00:00

Well, I started posting episodes of The Story of Gamer Zone online, and it's already starting to get a small following. (For anyone who didn't see my last .plan - it's the story of a business I was involved in that crashed and burned after two years. Gives some interesting insight to things like how mistakes can slowly add up and burn down a company.) Some of the old indie game dev rules I had kept coming to mind:

I spend my time and effort on things that make money. So don't do long projects that don't make money.

Not everyone who's an indie game developer does it for money - often it's just for the love of doing it. Some get lucky, and do it for the love of it, AND make money on it. For me, while it's great fun, I do it for money and love. But the money is first - I wouldn't work on a game project that wasn't for money. A man's gotta eat.

I realized how much effort I was putting into the story. Sure, I type REALLY fast, but still it's probably going to end up being damned near the size of a novel (and here I used to make fun of my .plan files being a novel!) That's still a good sized effort. So, I sort of grudgingly put up a "donate" button on the page.

Give people a reason to spend money.

I hate donate buttons. I've donated to other people's causes before, but, I really think someone would like some sort of reward when giving someone else money. Maybe I'm just old fashoned in my thinking. But I wouldn't give my games away for donations, and I was pondering how to make a small amount of cash off of The Story of Gamer Zone.

I've mentioned on here and on the site that The Story was being published once a week (it's now twice), and I write installments well ahead of time and keep 'em in a queue to release. A friend emailed me and asked if he could have advance access to the other completed segments (he's mentioned in The Story as "The Plumber"). So I give him editor rights to take a look at the upcoming stuff.

Then a game developer I know from on here emailed me and asked if he had to wait for installments to be released like the rest of the unwashed masses, or if I'd give him access to the upcoming stuff.

Once is an anomaly. Twice is a potential business model.

So I set it up so that for $5 (for two years) they have advanced access to installments after I write them for the queue. I call it "Read Ahead" (yeah, real imaginative name ;-). It's cheap, but it gives people a chance to get more of the story ahead of every one else.

I threw all the written but unpublished stuff into a new category on the side of the site called (again, imaginative) "Read Ahead". Each segment shows about one paragraph of that segment as a teaser, then information about Read Ahead, what it costs, and how to sign up.

No idea if it will net more than $10 over it's entire lifespan, but hey - that's 2 1/2 gallons of gas in the car!

Show payment options often, but don't intrude on content. And keep it simple!

If you're trying to sell something, people have to know it's for sale. You have to present it to them in an understandable, easy way. Saying, for instance, Go to paypal, create a new account, then click on "send payment" and type in my email address is bad. Too many steps. As close to one step between "Hm, I ought to buy this" and "Cool, I just bought that" is important. People get frustrated easily, and give up (without complaining via comment or email. Only a few people actually take the time to email a game author to say the game crashed. Unless it's a hardcore gamer. Then they'll email 12 times, each time with a different set of colorful language to explain how you're incompetent.)

So the site mentions it multiple times - but not in big garish signs. Twice on the sidebar about "Read Ahead" and once for every article they try and read that's unpublished.

This is all experimental, of course. No idea how well The Story will be received in the long run, or how many people are interested enough to read ahead in the story. But, as you might guess, I'll write up a small .plan here or write an article on one of my sites about the long term success of failure of the experiment.

But it kinda does show something - when you get into the business of being an Indie Game Developer, that spirit never quite leaves you.

On a similar subject...

For quite a while I had been considering writing a real book. You know, one of those analog things that they cut down trees to put on shelves that very few people bother with anymore, but they still manage to sell in largish quantities.

I'll admit it: this was all about Ego. I know more than one author, and I've always had a little bit of jealousy about my co-speaker at IGC '02, '03, and & 04' - David "RM" Michael had The Indie Game Developers Survival Guide, then later Serious Games. Hrm. I want my name on a book too, damnit. (Ok, so I did trump him in one respect - I owned and co-hosted a TV show. Like, broadcast on actual TV sort of TV show.

So I came up with a cool concept (video games and business), write an outline, introduction, first chapter, etc.

And then it just sat there.

And sat there.

The problem boiled down to was it worth the effort? I started in on The Story of Gamer Zone, and got to thinking about self-publishing it online in a similar episodic format (though at the time I didn't see any sort of business model for it.)

I talked to David and asked a bit about what he got out of the experience, money wise. OK, it would definitely be about feeding my ego more than my pocket book - factored out, his hourly take for having done the book ends up being about 1/3rd of the rate I charge for contracting. Hrm,

I finally said "fuggit." I'm going to write another couple of chapters (damned good thing I'm a fast typist ;-) and start releasing them online episodically like I've done with The Story of Gamer Zone. And then, when it's done, I'll take pre-orders for book shelf versions for anyone who wants 'em, and print some copies of my "book". Or maybe approach a publisher with it if the online readership is high enough. Who knows - but the end result is I'll at very minimum print myself one copy for myself :-) I'm in no hurry - I'm enjoying writing The Story of Gamer Zone at the moment, and probably won't invest a whole lot of effort on the other project until I'm getting close to done with the first one.

Funny little thing - was helping a friend the other day, and he introduced me to one of his customers "This is my friend Davis - he's an author, game developer, web developer, and jack of all trades." I'm not an author - there's no book on the shelves.

Yet ;-)

Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr
Midnight Ryder Technologies

Shh... a moment of silence for the dead ;-)

Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr — 2008-09-30T06:39:04+00:00

OK, I haven't posted on here in like... well, forever. Unlike my usual novels I write for .plans (er, Blogs, whatever), this one is going to be short and sweet. It's not Game Development, but it business related - and something Indies might want to look at.

Businesses die all the time. One of mine died screaming and kicking. Usually you get to hear about the death of a business second hand, and only the events leading up to the last couple of breaths of the company. Gamer Zone was a LAN gaming center in Wichita, Kansas. Games, geeks, and fun. I burned through two years of life trying to make Gamer Zone work, and unfortunately, it died.

There's a lot to be learned from failures, and most people have no choice but to learn from their OWN failures. I'm giving people a chance to learn from someone else's mistakes for once - I'm chronicling the company from just before it's first days to it's last days, and eventually it's aftermath and toll a failure can take on a person's life.

Right now the introduction and first "episode" is online (and four more episodes are already written), with a new one released every month until the entire story is told. Some of it is dry, some of it is funny, and some of it is a slow train wreck in progress.

Being a game developer (er, well, WAS a game developer - I haven't developed anything new in a couple of years, but that may change shortly ;-), some of the lessons are pretty interesting as applied to Indie Game Developers.

I'm also going to submit this as a resource (no idea if it's going to be accepted - it's kind of... off the wall for Garage Games resources) as a bit more information to give indie businesses a fighting chance.

The Story Of Gamer Zone

As for me... hehehehehe... the "game dev bug" has been biting me lately. I've kept up on the current versions of TGE and T2D (er, whatever the hell it's called now), so I might just sit down and start messing around one of these days ;-)

Where are they now? (IE - what the hell have I been up to lately?)

Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr — 2006-11-12T10:08:38+00:00

So, it's been ages since I sat down and wrote one of my novellas on what's going on, or my opinion on the current direction of Torque, whined about the community, or raved about someone's cool project.

Yeah, I've been a little busy. :-)

For a while, I got completely out of game development - I spent 100% of my time doing things like trying to get Gamer Zone, a Wichita, Kansas based LAN gaming center going like crazy. Running a one person indie game company takes a lot of time. You start dealing with a business that has a real world location, and things get even more insane :-)

And in the middle of doing all that, I did something insane. I started a TV show. On video games. Really. I'm not kidding you at all.

So far we've done 11 episodes of "World of Gamer Zone" which currently broadcast locally in Wichita, Kansas on KTQW channel 49. The way I did things, I kept the rights to the show - I don't make jack doing it, but, it allowed me the flexibility of doing the next logical thing with a show about video games - put it online. You can find all the current episodes of the show on YouTube, and at the show's website, WorldOfGamerZone.com.

The other beauty about owning the show - we decide what goes on the show, not a station manager or program director for a network or local station. Since I'm an indie developer, that means part of the show is on, well, game development usually with a skew towards Indie stuff. Cooooool :-)

The first thing you should know about TV. TV is evil. No, I'm not talking about watching TV being evil, I mean making a TV show is evil. The first episode was an amount of work you wouldn't have expected. Two cameras, a director, two camera people, two co-hosts, and lights. Should be simple, right?

BBBZZZZZZZZZT!! Wrong answer. Anything that could go wrong did. A couple of hours before the episode had to air, the editing machine died, but not before spitting out a really really really bad version of the first episode (the audio lost it's sync, so the episode was like kung-fu theater.) I'm one of the hosts for the show, the other host being a 6' 2" female friend of mine named Meredith - uh, luckly we set for all of the shooting of an episode, or my 5' 8" self would look REALLY short. Neither one of us had done something like this, so along with the tech problems, we had serious issues finding our footing both on what the show should sound like and getting our conversational style down. (Heck, if you want to see the evolution of the show more closely, on the website below each episode is a section with the credits for the episode along with notes from the Executive Producer (that's me too) about what changed that episode and what hurdles we overcame.)

Episode 2 was a bit better. Episode 3 rocked (erm, mainly because we reviewed Guitar Hero ;-). As you keep going, the thing slowly gets more refined, Meredith and I get more polished at it, etc. Episode 10 & 11 look closer to professional. It's cool to see it evolve.

Now, I mentioned that we're doing stuff on game development. One of the things added to the show was "Work In Progress" where I've been giving weekly updates on a game currently in development by myself (I picked on one of my old standbys - I'm doing Boulder Panic! 3) Of course, I had to pick my favorite engine to do it in - Torque2D (I almost refuse to refer to it as Torque Game Builder. Sounds like it should have a big "Make My Game Now" button in the upper right hand corner. Why must marketing people screw with a perfectly good name? Torque X - ok, that's a cool name that represents it's functionality when you find out it's for the X Box 360 setup. But Torque Game Builder? Give me a bloody break. It's still Melv's Torque2D work to me ;-) Anyway, rant aside, it's going to be cool to watch the game evolve on a weekly basis, all the way into the marketing portion.

Now for the bad news - my co-host works at a job that ends up being 6 or 7 days a week towards the end of the year all the way until April. Ug. So now I'm digging for more co-hosts and stuff like that. David "RM" Michael of PaintBall Net & "The Indie Game Development Survival Guide" fame (along with him and I co-speaking at IGC '02, '03, & '04) is planning on coming up and doing two episodes of the show. Cool :-) I've talked to David a number of times since IGC, but, haven't seen him in person for a while (ICQ and phones are nice, but, setting down and chatting with someone in person is still completely different.)

But needless to say the co-host situation has slowed things down a bit, though I've got the next episode planned and go back to taping next weekend. Woohoo! This got me to thinking a little more about stuff like interviews using webcams (or if they are close enough, stopping by the studio in person for an episode as a one-episode co-host), stuff like that. So, if you're an indie game dev, drop me a line (daviss@worldofgamerzone.com) if your interested in possibly showing up on the show sometime - I've got the format for some panel style discussions about the market, etc. that I'd like to try out one of these days, along with just a regular ol' interview type thing :-)

Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr
World of Gamer Zone / Midnight Ryder Technologies

Thursday Jun 2 8:21

Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr — 2005-06-02T08:21:35+00:00

Gamer Zone hosts the World Cyber Games for Wichita, Kansas and surrounding areas... instead of our usual $1000 tournaments, players now get to compete for thier part of a $400,000 wad of cash and prizes! (And of course some of my usual .plan stuff in here too ;-)

I'm stoked. Gamer Zone is going to be hosting the World Cyber Games local prelims for Wichita, Kansas (and anyone within driving distance :-) We've done a good number of local tournaments before, but, this is participating on a world wide scale. 1.2 million players are expected to compete this year. For anyone interested, here's the quick schedule of events:

June 11th - Counter Strike
June 16th - Counter Strike League Prelims Begin
June 25th - Halo 2
June 30th - Counter Strike League Begins (Last possible day to register!)
July 2nd - Warcraft III: Frozen Throne*
July 9th - Starcraft: Brood War*

(The * is because we don't normally have Warcraft or Starcraft - our license from Blizzard is a one-shot tournament authorization for the event, then we unload the games. I really want Blizzard to offer us licensing for a MUCH more reasonable cost than they do right now, something like how Valve does it. But I'm not holding my breath.)

You'll notice there's a League in there too - iGames called me last night and asked if we were interesting in hosting a World Cyber Games Counter Strike league. Gamer Zone's plan was to start a league immediately after the 11th - like on a Thursday night, and run it for like 8 - 10 weeks. Oddly enough, the called, and thier plan was EXACTLY what I had planned here locally already without discussing it with iGames or the WCG. Obviously this was just meant to be :-)

My next job tomarrow during the day will be to send out press releases to anyone who'll listen here in town ;-) Which makes me currious - what's the breakover point for "newsworthy" in the eyes of the various media outlets on a local level? I've sent out a press release or two before, but, we never had something that was really "Kick-Ass" to talk about. Games are now sporadically newsworthy these days - I guess this will be an interesting experment :-)

This also comes back to that interesting debate about when / if games will become more like a sport with amature, semi-pro, and pro athletes, sponsors, etc. Right now it's still a little hard to get sponsors for an event (we don't have any, but I haven't pushed real hard for it), but there are tourneys and tournament organizations that find corporate sponsors. I don't think things are quite "there" yet, but in another 5 years? I think it will finally happen. To me there's a fundamental problem with games going big-time sport - spectators. Right now it's not that exciting to watch most games. I've pondered a bit what could be done to enhance the experience for audiences, and really haven't come to any conclusions. Is there a way to do it?

I would have posted Game Design by Observation #2 - but it got lost. Twice. I've written it a third time on Saturday, but, didn't feel like posting it today for some reason. I'll post it this weekend sometime.

Content showed up for one of the games I worked on ages ago - Attack of the Goobers finally has it's boss models and textures. When I get it integrated (sometime this weekend also) I'll post a screenshot, and AotG will start it's Beta run. Yep - that means at IGC this year I'll have something to show. Actually, I should have two games to show :-)

Ok, I've shared my most exciting stuff for the week... now it's back to real work :-)

Thursday Apr 28 10:40

Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr — 2005-04-28T10:40:20+00:00

A new "feature" - Game Design by Observation. Gamer Zone continues to move along just fine. It's interesting how a "simple" task can go completely insane on your sometimes - here's an example. Indie life continues at a fast pace, people on IRC really get on my nerves, and more in this edition of my "Oh my god can this guy write longer .plans?"novel in a .plan. (And the answer is no - there's a limit on the size of a .plan. I've reached it before ;-)

OK, it's not like my .plan files are a newsletter, magazine, or similar. It's just my .plan file. But for some reason, I keep wanting to well... add something useful to it :-) I'm finally getting around to creating a "feature" that's going to be regular in my .plans = "Game Design By Observation". This should be fun, and start some interesting flame wars from time to time. Don't worry, my usual drivel is still in here ;-)

Game Design by Observation
The premise of Game Design by Observation is this: All day, 5 - 6 days a week, I see gamers playing games at my LAN Gaming Center, Gamer Zone. You start to see some interesting trends, and have some interesting conversations with people. At the same time, my wife is getting her degree in Industrial Psychology (actually a double major - she's also getting Sociology), so we discuss a lot about what we observe since she's also interested in the game design & development field.

A while back, I realized this could be useful information for us Indies - anything that gives us a potential edge is useful. I read game design articles in various places, and quite often it seems like the people who write 'em haven't actually done much more than write games, and explain game design from their point of view as a developer. But what point of view matters the most?

The Gamer, duh. They are the ones who buy the games. Want to make money? Make the gamer happy. (Oversimplified of course - there's a lot more to it than that. Marketing. Marketing. Quality product. Marketing.)

So, I'm taking the observations from my time at Gamer Zone, putting fingers to keyboard, and passing them on to anyone who bothers to read this thing :-) Just like the game design articles aren't always right, my stuff shouldn't be considered to be the worlds greatest resource for game design information ;-) It's free advice, and sometimes when you read more than one .plan in a row, it's going to contradict it's self ('Specially because different observations are made about different game types.) It should also be noted that this is from the perspective of someone who's also very interested in the business side of things. Sure, there are people who do "Pure Game Design" - not worrying about their market, or how much money they will make, they just want a game. My hat's off to ya guys. But I've got to make money when I write a game - I don't want to have to keep a day job just so I can write games :-) So you'll see a lot of intermixing of game design and the market side. Not a bad thing, trust me ;-)

So here goes GDO #1..

Game Design by Observation #1: Innovation? Heck, Give Them More Of The Same!
I'll start with something that will totally discredit me as a game designer. Forget innovation sometimes. There, I said it. It goes totally against the grain of what most of us Indies say we want to do. We talk about how we need to innovate, break the chains of sequilitis, do new things, and hit new nitch markets.

And Indies are absolutely right, sometimes. Innovation allows you to crack an entirely new area that no one is serving, is underserved currently, or hasn't been served with a new product in a long time. Heck, I want to do a 2D platformer (Jumpman: 2049) so bad I can taste it. No one hardly does non-side scrolling 2D platformers anymore, so why not serve that area.

This is where we fall into Problem #1 with innovation. If it's not like anything else, how do you market it? Right now, if you product a first person tactical shooter, when someone talks about the game it's "Like Counter Strike, but with..." But what if it's a new idea? How do you market something that breaks new territory?

If someone has invested skills in FPS games, they tend to stick in that area for the most part. That's not to say they won't check something new out, its just that they tend to stay within their developed skillset and gamestyle. For that matter, if they are heavy duty Halo players (for instance) getting them convinced to play anything else may require extraordinary efforts!

Now, that's not to say that it's a great thing to go head to head with Counter Strike or any other game. But when a market awareness of an existing game style exists, it does give you a leg up with getting people's attention. 10 copies of Soldner are on their way to Gamer Zone right now - will it get played? Yep - there's pleanty of Counter Strike and Battlefield 1942 players already there, so shifting to a similar game to check it out is easy. What about those 16 copies of Zap! that I have? That's going to be harder to get players on at first since it's so far from what they already play. (This is a subject for another day - I can now market any game within the center, once I found The Secret To Swaying Gamers in Gamer Zone ;-)

Someone is going to point out "But, if I'm writing something new, I'm not nessiarily shooting for the FPS market." Of course you're not. You're shooting for anyone that will possibly play the game - when you build something innovative, your potential market could be just about anywhere to a certain degree. That's a strength and a weakness. I'm just telling you what I observe - the same things apply to RPG fans, FPS fans, MMO players, etc. - they stick to their area for the most part.

Now for problem #2 - we bemoan sequels. We hate them. We talk about the lack of innovation in the market.

Ok, time to wake up - if you sell 10k copies of WolferDo3D, what's your next game? If you say MegaPuzzler, I'm gonna take a whack at you at the next IGC. Seriously. Strike when the iron is hot - start working on WolferDo 2: Do's Revenge when you start seeing numbers like those. And keep doing them. It WILL run out of steam, and you can do other projects (heck, if you're talented and have way too much time on your hands, do something else as a "side project" while you're doing WolferDo 7: Do Just Won't Stop! so that you do have something else in the pipeline.) But if your goal is to make money and support yourself as an Indie, sequels to a game that's doing good is a good idea. Heck, do expansion packs, sequels, and anything else you can think of to make money off of your customer base. The more noise you make with each itteration, the more people you could POTENTIALLY attract with the next release. Keep your fan base focused on your game - don't let them wander off into Counter Strike territory and get addicted there - keep them addicted to WolferDo and active players. It's hard to build a customer base, but when you have it, KEEP IT.

And here's the cool part - if you do a WolferDo expansion pack, did it cost you as much as writing a brand new MegaPuzzler? If you did it right, you didn't get close. You already had the gameplay design down, you just added new content and elements, and possibly revamped the graphics. You cycle time from idea to release is shorter, and your resource utilization is shorter. Save your cash up from the WolferDo 3D series, and if MegaPuzzler doesn't work out, you've still (hopefully) got cash reserves enough to do another game.

But be careful with sequels. There are some risks - you could be considered a one product developer. Is that bad? Not while you're doing WolferDo's but when you release MegaPuzzler it could be an issue. Also be extremely careful about modifying gameplay in WolferDo. I have a lot of Counter Strike 1.6 players. I don't have jack for constant Counter Strike: Source players. Why? Small changes in gameplay can make a huge difference to the players. Headshots in CS:S are way too easy. Pacing changed a little. The buy menus aren't as useful. Etc, etc, etc. Instead of a high adoption rate, it's a dead product for us. How do you avoid it? Listen to your players. Halo players complain like you wouldn't believe about Halo 2 - but Bungie listened, and released a patch (for X-Box - what a strange concept, but it works!) that changed how melee attacks work, reballanced weapons, etc. Suddenly my Halo 2 players are happy again - they LOVE Halo 2 1.1! Why? Because it's more of the same stuff as the first game they initally fell in love with. That's right, more of the same sells better than something completely new. So much for innovation :-)

I'll address two more things before I call GDO #1 good - someone is going to mention an innovative game that sold well. Of course it happens. If innovation NEVER happened, and never succeded, we'd be playing Space War right now. But weigh the number of innovative loosers -vs- innovative winners, and you'll see a trend.

Somone is going to say that's an unfair comparison for the Indie market. You might be right, in all honesty. I'm looking at titles from a more commercial level. But, then again... how many games have to be sold to support you, your modeler, texure artist, sound guy, and marketing guy as full time Indies? That's a lot of games - I never sold enough Boulder Panic!'s to support that many people :-) If you're going to think about "Full Time Indie" I think you're going to have to think about projects that have a much better return.

Am I done talking about Innovation? Nope. I think GDO #2 is going to be about how you can use innovation to your advantage. Told you these things were going to conflict with each other from time to time ;-) Seriously, when I write that one, you'll see how the two side of the same subject fit together as a recipe for potential success.

Let the flames begin... ;-)

Sometimes it's the Simple Stuff That Gets Ya!
You look at a task. Jeez, this is gonna be a piece of cake. I'll just... and it all goes downhill from there. I'm writing this down to share the pain :-)

The task: AI in a game. Someone asked me to do a little AI work, and even provided me with a book that has a sample that runs pretty much how they want it to run. All I have to do is translate it all over to Torque. When I looked at it, i thought... oh, maybe three, four weeks.

Try around 3 MONTHS. I'm not kidding. Talk about underestimating a task. But, if I had an example, how the heck could it be so hard?

1) In the book, the author has his own engine, and built up the AI based on that engine. There's no concept of multi-player here. Heck, there's no concept of a player in his engine, just the AI players doing their thing with other AI players.

2) It's all in C++, but I like to keep most AI stuff in script (with some exceptions). So it's got to be rewritten in Torque Script. TS is one o' my favorite scripting languages (which means something coming from a script whore like me ;-) Sure, lots of people have problems with it, but, I sincerely like with some minor exceptions. However, when trying to translate something from C++ to TorqueScript, don't try and get to litteral with the translation - accept the differences in the language, and move on :-)

3) It does a couple o' buggery things like use the onRender function to act as a tick for the AI. Sure, it's a minor thing. But minor things start to add up. It starts taking time to design around the original concept to make it fit.

4) It was zero-player code, and I knew while at the moment the goal was to replicate the functionality of the code. No matter how much you know the goal... Well, ever heard that saying "It's hard to remember the task was to drain the swamp when you're up to your elbows in alligators?" It applies here - working with a multi-player engine it's hard to remember to focus on something as simple as a bot-only solution.

5) Some behaviors are a PITA because of engine differences. When I was getting close to wrapping up to move to a different project (I already have) I had to apologize for what I felt were errors in behavior - it didn't react EXACTLY like the original because of things like, oh, collision with the terrain, going from a 2D universe to a 3D universe, collision with the player, etc.

But still.. 3 months?! Wow. Now that I've done it though, I can honestly say if approached with a similar task, I could do it much much more easily now:

1) Forget the code. If it wasn't written for the engine you're using, it's not really that useful 'specially if it's not in the same language!

2) Find and Identify the desired behaviors from the original example. Find and Identify the behaviors that are going to be an issue with the engine you are using.

3) Iteratively design and implement those behaviors.

4) Read step 1 again, and keep it in mind. Build it from scratch, it's faster than adapting sometimes. (Repeat - sometimes ;-)

Wow - looks simple, right? Yeah, it probably is. Who knows - it's probably going to be a while before I get another project request like that one, so I won't be testing it for a while. And if you ask anyone else, they'd have a different (and possibly better :-) process.

People On IRC Really Get On My Nerves
The downside to being available on IRC all the time now - people really tick me off more and more. I'm starting a Hall of GG Shame one of these days for the dumbest things I see happen on IRC in the #GG channel. (I won't bother talking about the #GID channel, we intentionally do stupid things from time to time like bait n00bs ;-)

Someone asked a good question in IRC. So far, a good start. I told 'em no problem, there's a resource that covers that in the resources. Yeah, this is where the story goes down hill. They privately ask me the same thing. I say it's in the resources, just go look - sorry, I can't be your personal Google Search Appliance. Then they ask the same thing in the channel. I tell 'em.... you guessed it, there's a resource for that, go look. They ask AGAIN. They finally get on my nerves enough that I pop open gg, and search for it. Found it the first time. Posted the link. They inform me they already know PHP + MySQL, they want to learn about Torque + MySQL. The resource was Ron Y.'s work on Torque and MySQL. OMG!

Then there's the disturbing trend for people to announce that they are going to ask a question, or ask if they can ask a question (which, well, you've just used up your one question, move along now ;-) An amazing number of people want to write MMO's now. I mean, the list goes on and on.

So I propose this: Everyone, send a very nice message to all the GG people who man the channel on a nearly constant basis. How in the heck they manage to filter and put up with some of this stupidity that occurs when you try and help someone is beyond me. Salute!

Gamer Zone Continues To Move Along
I thought I'd put an obligatory mention of Gamer Zone in here :-) Right now it's not super-exciting cool changes or anything - little iterative changes are occurring (for instance, changing how we do memberships) that are based on our experiences to date. The longer we're at this, the more things we figure out we can improve upon - and we do so without much fear.

We're also going to be part of the World Cyber Games this year as a local center to play at. Cool :-) Guild Wars will be on the machines by the time I get back in town, and we've got more cool stuff like the Battlefield 2 premier coming up soon.

We're still looking at location #2 at the moment (IE, looking for space, hardware, money, and people) in Wichita. The most interesting part about it is a totally new cool layout for any new Gamer Zones we build that addresses our physical space issues we've ran into before. Amazing how different you do things when you have some experience :-)

Indie Life Continues at a Fast Pace
Right now I'm actually out of town doing a contract stint back in my old field of Industrial Automation. My god I'm glad I'm not longer with a company that does this full time. I'm so bloody used to the idea of working 12 hour days when on site, I was floored when I asked about what hours they were going to be there, and they only expected me to work about 8 hours! Holy SMOKES! And to top it off, I'm not really working that many hours - part of the time I hop on, check my email, do a little more on game dev contract work, etc. as this process or that finishes up. And of course I have all night to set in a hotel room and program (which is a pretty convenient setup these days - two laptops, since I'm doing Windows stuff too, so IRC and email sets on the Mac, and I program on the PC laptop. No need to swap back and forth between windows to hold a conversation. I can be on IRC and still be productive, unlike John Vanderbeck ;-)

Friday I head back to Wichita to the normal Gamer Zone / Midnight Ryder grind. I've got my schedule for most things pretty optimized now, so I've got time to put in 40 hours a week on game dev while I handle Gamer Zone at the same time - work the counter and program, then also do a little more programming at home. Very nice :-)

One cool thing going on with contract work is that I'm working with Dave Myers, ex-21-6 guy. Dave and I had talked about doing a project together, and never quite managed to get it together. Well, now he's the person I'm working with directly on contract stuff. Very cool, and fun to see how small of a world Indie game dev is :-)

Oh, and if anyone cares - I now have a Skype account. Look for me as MidnightRyder - though I'm not sure how much I'll use it yet. So far all I've done is talk to Tom Bampton and make fun of the IRC channels ;-)

#secret112a

Sunday Mar 6 10:52

Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr — 2005-03-06T10:52:40+00:00

"A slow return to sanity", "Ever give away $1000? I have, twice now!", "Ever played games on a 420" screen?", "forget writing games for girls", "World Domination Through Collaboration outside of the Indie world", "Contract work", and more cool stuff in my triumphant return to writing .plan novels that you all have missed so much ;-)

A Slow Return To Sanity
As many people who followed my .plan files might have guessed, I dropped out of the GG community almost completly after IGC '05. I've been watching people's .plan files, and on rare occasion commenting on 'em. But other wise, I keep my ICQ turned off, don't log into IRC, don't cruse the forums (which says I have 12,222 unread posts at the moment. Eeks.), etc. So what happened?

Gamer Zone. That's what. For a while I was dividing my attention too many directions, and had to drop a couple of things to make it all work. Gamer Zone is awsome... and it's been insanity at the same time. I've semi-successfully moved from a full time job to owning my own business (Midnight Ryder Technologies, an indie game development company for those who just happened to drop by for the first time on my .plans.) There's a huge set of differences between owning your own indie game dev business and being part owner of a real-world business. Some things are better, some things are worse.

But things with Gamer Zone are cooling down a bit. No, I don't mean the gaming center is going under or anything like that. Just the opposite - it's hit stability now. Every day isn't a scramble to find ways to get new customers, fix broken things (thought that still happens from time to time - getting a new 3 MB connection from Cox resulted in MUCH breakage of my Internet connection!), handle marketing, pay bills, figure out were to get the money to pay bills sometimes, etc. It's by no means boring either. It's an absolute blast. But instead of busting my ass non-stop all day, I now find there's many hours in the day to do other things like game development again.

I also helped one of my partners build a new school in a small section of Gamer Zone that he rents out from us. It's an English language lab to teach English to the growing non-English speaking population of the US. Interesting stuff, and very satisfying to stand back and look at something you built and feel that you have an impact on the local culture and community.

So, expect to see me around again. I don't quite have enought time to pursue my own personal game dev projects at the moment (contracting takes up that time.) But I can at least start updating my .plan files now, and probably start turning on my ICQ again at nights :-)

As Gamer Zone becomes more and more "in the grove", I'll also start shifting my focus away from it, and back to game development. We built Gamer Zone, but the price was damned steep - Midnight Ryder Technologies has suffered because of it, and soon it's time to go back and fix that problem. I've still got a list of games I want to do someday, and after my experiences with Gamer Zone, I've got some new tricks up my sleeve and some new plans on how to overcome certain problems.

I've mentioned this before, and it's still cool - if you ever want to find out what people like in games, go start a lan gaming center like Gamer Zone. You'll find out real quick what the hard-core gamers want in a game. Stick around longer, and you start finding out what the casual gamers want in a game too. That transitions into my next part...

Forget Writing Games For Girls
My wife is finishing her BA in Sociology and Industrial Psychology this semester, and moving on to her Masters in Industrial Psych (and eventually her PhD, with a stop along the way to pick up her business degree.) Needless to say, since she's a gamer she takes great interest in games from the standpoint of phychology. So both of us watch what people play at Gamer Zone with great interest, looking to crack the code of what the next digital crack pipe will be.

Recently I read Game Developer magazine's short articles on writing games for women. Of course, I had to think those articles over for a while, as did my wife. I was watching a female customer playing Halo 2 the other day, and realized something. Something very important.

Don't write games for girls. Just write games. Handle the rest in marketing.

I said that to my wife, and she thought about it a minute and agreed with me. We've discovered that a game that's fun for a guy is just as fun for a girl. The problem is:

1) Games are marketed to guys typically. Big boobs and big explosions are the name of the game in marketing most often. Very few ads are geared towards anyone buy the guys, even though the gals will find it just as fun once they get into it.

2) There's a steriotype about gamers (which is slowly evaporating, thankfully) of geeky guys with no life, faces like pizzas or fat butts, etc. Needless to say, nothing about the steriotype really appeals to women ;-)

3) No one likes to feel inferior. Most gals I see who pick up a joypad or keyboard to play do something on thier own first, until they feel more confident. They may still get thier butt whooped, but that doesn't mean that much - it's that inital feeling of inferiority they have to overcome.

BTW: Part 2 & 3 often applys to the guys who are non-gamers too.

Now, in game there are things that will piss women off at times. Then again, it's impossible to write something without finding a way to offend SOMEONE.

Someday I'll expand my thoughts about women as a market for games, but, hopefully that turns the light on in at least one persons head to start thinking differently about how to market thier games, or at least spawns some conversation about it.

Ever Give Away $1000? I Have, Twice Now!
One of the greatest marketing tactics is to give away money. It never fails to get people's attention :-) We hosted our first Halo 2 tourney a while back, and gave away $1000 in cash prizes at Gamer Zone. Then a month later we did it again, giving away another $1000. April 17th, we'll be hosting our 3rd Halo 2 tourney, this time giving away $1500 in cash prizes. There's three parts to the tourney - a slayer portion (IE, single player), two man teams portion, and a four man teams portion.

It's interesting to watch the tournaments - I watched the runner up two-man team game last time, and I've never seen a match that went so close and was that kick-butt to see happening. (The finals for both tourneys were boring, IMHO, since the skill level between the top team and the next team down wasn't close enough.)

Right now on Sundays I'm helping out the guy we partnered up with to do a Madden 2005 tournament where he's giving away $5000, and it looks like sometime in July we'll be doing yet another Halo 2 tourney where we give away $6000. Now that's getting serious about games when you start giving away that sort of money :-)

Have you ever played games on a 420" screen?
One of the kick-butt things that happened because of getting involved in these tournaments is that the Madden 2005 tournament takes place in Oscar's Sports Bar here in Wichita. It's attached to a movie theater (The Warren Old Town, arguably one of the best in the nation), so they put in a movie theater in the sports bar, and threw in a big honkin' digital projector for it. It's over two stories tall, and I guestimate the diagonal picture measurement at around 420". Wow. Beeing geeks, we can't possibly miss up an opportunity, so we played Madden 2005 on it. I'm bringing a copy of Halo 2 this weekend to play off and on during the Madden tourney, just to say we've played it on there :o) Hmm... did Marble Blast ever ship for the X-Box? (I remember rumors of such a beastie - if it does, Hey Jay - can you send me a copy, and I'll send you a mega impressive picture of it on the biggest screen it will ever be played on? :o) And I get to do this for three more weekends after this! So this isn't even just a one-time fluke, for a while I get to routinely play games on this screen! :-)

Next weekend I'll make a little use of Toruqe on the big screen too - I'm using the Powerbook 17" (damn I still love this machine!) to power the big screen, and I have a small mini-project I whipped up to do my ladder brackets more easily on the big screen, but I haven't had the chance to finish it (I've only spent 3 hours on it so far, but I'll work on it while I'm at the tourney :-) so the ladders will be powered by Torque and I'll display 'em off and on using the big screen. Yet another use for Torque ;-) (Note: No, I'm not an Indie licensee. Technically, you can't use the Indie licensed version of Torque to do something like that. I bought a commercial license for it quite a while back.)

World Domination Through Collaboration Outside of the Indie World
So how in the world am I getting away with giving away so much money? World Domination Through Collaboration, baby! (Ye gods I shouldn't have watched Goldmember today while working) It's not just for Indies :-) MB Inc. does tournaments and events that are designed to market businesses in the local area with things like the Home Made Bikini Contest. He had been doing the Madden 2005 and NBA Live 2005 tournaments at a local resteraunt, but when he started to do Halo 2 he came and talked to us, and a deal was struck. Technically, we don't make a dime directly off of the tournaments, but we do get increased consessions sales the day of the tournament. But the big portion of the payoff for us is increased awareness of Gamer Zone. He prints big glossy posters and hand outs, gives out about 5000 copies of the hand outs, put the posters in high-visibility locations like video rental stores in the area, etc.

In return, he gets to use our space, I run the tournaments (though that may or may not be the case in the future - he's got someone who's supposed to run the tournaments now), handle the brackets, etc. While his main business is to make money by selling these events to companies, he doesn't charge us a dime. Collaboration at it's best.

The only downside, for him, is that if registrations aren't high enough, then he takes a loss on the tournament. The first of the two Halo 2 tourneys went well, but the second one was only 20 days after the first - too short of a time.

Contract Work
I mentioned not having time for doing my own games - but that's not to say I'm not doing game development. Right now I'm working on (HA! I can't tell you ;-) for MVP Online. In a "It's a small world" type thing, you might have saw Dave Myers mention that he's doing a contract stint for them too.

The first new thing I had to deal with in taking on this contract was SVN. I've used CVS, but never delt with SVN before this, so the guy from MVP and I spent much time going over how to make it work. Of course I have to complicate maters - I'm on a Mac, he's on a PC using Tortouse SVN. Hrm. Much manual reading later, I'm now "competent" with SVN (by no means an expert) using the command line (I decided to go that direction so that no matter what my next platform is, I know how to use SVN instantly).

My experience with SVN so far is that it's indeed better than CVS, but, isn't the end all be all of revision control. It's got a lot of power, but damn it takes some time to get used to it. But using it is better than not using it. I did have one case were I should have been making commits when I hadn't - no, this didn't result in a huge session of doing manual diffs on files or anything. Instead, I completely hashed up my development directory somehow (that contained my latest copy of Boulder Panic! 3, which was something like 3 months untouched already, the code for the project I'm working on now, and a couple of my older projects that were in experemental stages.) That really really really really sucked. A couple o' weeks work on AI down the drain. On the flip side, it's always A LOT easier to rebuild something like that than it was to do it the first time (at least for me it is) so what took weeks now takes days since it was fresh in my mind. Commit to your own branch often is my new motto :-)

One of the things that really feels odd about contract work is that I don't have to deal with anyone except the project lead. All I gotta focus on is tech issues. I don't have to talk to the artist, I don't have to find someone to do the UI, etc. I just have to focus on things like the AI and game play.

A nice thing about this is that Joe at MVP seems to be a hell of a nice guy to work with, and I get to work on a different sort of game than I've done before. Of course, with contract work comes these strange little pieces of paper I had to sign and send Joe, like the NDA that prevents me from actually saying what I'm working on :-)

I do have to count myself lucky - I've yet to do contract work with any real jerks yet. I can honestly say I hope to hell my luck continues in that respect.

Torque 2D
They shipped Torque 2D - WOOHOOO!!!! This means I'll be porting Boulder Panic!, Tile Panic!, and Flip Panic! to Torque, and sellin' 'em on the Mac one of these days. Along with finally attacking one of my pet projects again someday (Jumpman 2049... which kind of brings me full circle with Torque anyway, since Juff Tunnel was the one that said I should try it for Jumpman 2049, and I never actually DID the game in Torque, it got sidelined for other things, and now I'm looking at Torque 2D for it)

But there's one thing that's really bugging me about T2D already. The price. Keeping in mind I'm a complete tight-ass these days about money, but it's going to cost me $80 for a 2D engine when I paid $100 to license Torque initally? (And later, another $300 I think for my commercial license for it.) That seems a bit steep.

On the flip side, looking at who's involved in it's development, it's going to be a SOLID platform. It will rock. And after I'm done with sticker shock, I'll love it and use the hell out of it. I hope a butt-load of copies of it sell - it would be great to see the folks involve like Melv get a metric buttload of cash off of it - they deserve it!

I'm also hoping it helps to reduce the barrier for entry for some Indies, producing an environment where they don't have to have a modeler, level editor, etc., and can do more work for themselves (yes, they will still need a 2D artist, and a sound guy probably if the don't use licensed content.)

Life Changes
Doing Gamer Zone forced a lot of changes on my wife Heather and I. Now we're finally getting to the point where we are the ones deciding on the life changes. I'm selling my 1999 Mitsubishi Eclispe Spyder convertable and buying an older (late 80's, early to mid 90's) Jaguar as soon as I can get the Spyder sold off. I don't have tons of money (money is still tight some months) but the one I'm looking at isn't particularly expensive (about $6k - new Jags sell for tons of money here, but older Jags are cheap) The one I'm looking at is an XJ6 Sovergn - yep, a 4 door semi-reasonable car (well, I can't own a car that doesn't have some flair to it. No Ford Torus for me, thanks.) Why? Well - my wife and I are finally setting up "the nest" for having little ones. No, there will be no Davis 3.0, the name stops with me. We're still a ways off from actually trying for kids, but we want to start sometime in the next 6 - 10 months.

Yeah, I know - might be more personal than some people are interested in. But I'm actually mentioning this particular part of life changes because I'm wondering - how will that affect my game development practices? I mean, right now I work when I'm parked behind the counter at Gamer Zone late at night (my "shift" is from 8 PM till 2 AM, or until I have less than 3 customers in the store. Right now that means I'm staying quite often to as late as 7 AM!) and at home when I'm not sleeping. Does your schedule change drastically when kids are involved? I assume so, but it's hard to say how that works. Any experienced people want to give me an idea what I'm about to get myself into when it comes to work schedule? :-)

The other life change is that Heather is getting ready to get a loan to do the resteraunt we've been wanting to do (originally the funding for it was supposed to come from an outside source, but that changed). Yep, as one project gets closer to completion, the next one revs up. However, I'm not the primary on Lightning Dog - she is. So it's her turn to take on all the headaches of starting a business (including the fear involved - she's experiencing that right now.) Before, she was a partner, and spent a lot of time supporting me. Now it's my turn to be the person in the support role. It's strange for me to NOT be in a lead role in anything I do, so this is a bit of an odd experience for me.

And we finally have started forcing ourselves to get out and be social with friends again. Thank ye gods for that. It was way too easy to spend all our time at Gamer Zone, and not worry about doing things like going to the movies with friends. It's a bit of a mistake, IMO, since at the store you've always got to be on your guard, friendly (no matter what), etc. With friends, youre allowed to just let your hair down and be yourself. Ya know, if you look back through my .plans, I'm sure you can find where I've done the same mistake before! :-)

Oh, and it appears that some people who are Gamer Zone customers discovered my .plan files. Howdy all! See, Godwin, I finally updated my .plan ;-)

Until next .plan... SEE YA!

Wednesday Oct 6 6:25

Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr — 2004-10-06T06:25:27+00:00

Just in time for IGC - Marble Attack final builds! So I'll be bringin' it with me when I show up at IGC...

I'll make this .plan amazingly short (well, for one of my .plans) Cody at Digital Snow and I have been going back and forth doing final bug thwaping. Well, we finally did it - the last build. Installer for the Windows demo is ready to go, as is the installer for the full verison for Windows. Looks like the Mac build will have to wait until after I get back from IGC though :-/ I'll be flyin' out to Eugene, OR tomarrow, and spend Thursday runnin' around Oregon with my wife, looking at the sites. I could definitely make use of some "downtime" - running your own business can be very stressful. Running TWO business is just plain insanity some days.

But It feels awsome. Marble Attack, in it's inital release incarnation is done. Gamer Zone's new site is almost done, and when I get back it will get finished off, then Lightning Dog's construction process begins. Dispite having this many irons in the fire (possibly too many), projects are still getting completed. By some strange coincidence after surviving the unbelieveable time crunches I've been under, David "RM" Michael and I will be speaking about Time Management in the tools and techniques breakouts. (Or, if you believe the site, we'll be speaking on Surviving As An Indie. Hmmm... well, we're speaking about SOMETHING anyway :-)

I'll be honest though - Marble Attack doesn't excite me nearly as much as the next game on To Do contract work list. Marble Attack is really a retro styled game, sort of a typical 80's arcade "kill 'em all" as waves and waves come at you. That's cool and all, but, the next one is going to be a multi-player blast!

Expect to see Marble Attack loaded on the machines at the ShowOFF center at IGC, of course :-)

Lookin' forward to seein' ya' all there!

Wednesday Sep 1 9:22

Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr — 2004-09-01T09:22:52+00:00

My new baby: The 17" Powerbook, Gamer Zone continues chuggin' along, licensing new games, working with Digital Snow (Who's that) on Marble Attack (what's that), what ever happened to Trajectory Zone, and Midnight Ryder Technologies develops a new arm - real-world publishing for Indies (Umm... does that mean I'm no longer an Indie?!), and more stuff in the REALLY REALLY long .plan that proves I'm still alive!

No, I'm not dead. No, I didn't give up game development. Yes, I'm doing just fine - GREAT in fact!!! Go grab a cuppa - this one is gonna be a long read, with some boring stuff interemixed with some pretty interesting and possibly insane stuff.

Ok, now you ready to set down and read it all? Cool.

Last time I posted, I was the PR Guy for Gamer Zone. WEELLLL... things have changed a bit. I'm now the final athority on the place. That produces some new... interesting challenges. One of the first things I did was set down and set up a plan to offload work. Yep, I quit being the PR guy in some ways, but I'm still the public face, and I'm still the guy that determines direction for marketing - I just happen to determine the direction for a lot more now.

But I'm also a game developer still - so it was time for a change. I had moved my office down to Gamer Zone during the startup phase (where I worked 7 days a week at the store, 6 hours a day as one of the counter people, and 4 - 6 working on everything else) but now that I was being freed up (I still work behind the counter, 3 days a week) I needed the ability to travel back and forth between the office and the home office. Solution: 17" Powerbook 1.5 Ghz machine. Yeah, it's love. :-)

This thing is unfathomably cool. It looks cool. It runs sweet. And it's a Mac. I mean, what more could I want, except possibly a G5 or dualcore G4 version of it? :-) This also means that I have ***FINALLY*** moved my full time development platform over to Mac. I'm still getting things moved over, but man o' man am I happy :-) I still can't find ONE minor item that I need - I really really could use Milkshape 3D for Mac. That would be wonderful. I know Blender exists, but damnit - I don't want to learn something new again.

One of the other things that getting the Powerbook means that I finally have enough time to do things like keep up on email, turn on my ICQ again (well, just as soon as I find something as good as Trillian for the Mac), and finally show back up in the GameInADay channel on IRC. Whooohooo!

The other thing I enjoy - which is probably odd to some people - XCode. I've gotten to work with it before (on the 12" PB that we got for my wife, and for me to test on / program on. Good theory, never worked as planned really) and really enjoyed the heck outta it. Somehow, it feels... more refined than Visual Studio. Of course, being a bit of a freak about being able to work on everything from within one environment (editing wise), I created my own pblangspec and pbfilespec for XCode. They aren't as well done as I like - syntax highlighting works for the standard keywords, Code Sense works, etc. But I'd also like to somehow see a few other features that XCode supports do thier thing with TorqueScript, and I'd like to be able to get the consoleCommands in there as well (exporting them from the engine to a nice list that processes into the pblangspec file easily) But I only spent 30 minutes working on it: googled for an example of the formats for other languages, then did some editing. Oddly enough, I never found and docs on the pblangspec and pbfilespec formats, what they support, and what cool stuff I could do. If anyone has a link to 'em, drop me a line - I wouldn't mind expanding it just a bit further. I'll release the two files later when I feel they work "just right". Ok, 'nuff ramblin about my new toys :-)

One of the other things that I took over at Gamer Zone was hunting down and aquiring new licensing (since, IMO, we need to keep up with new stuff when it comes out.) Well, I keep hearing horror stories about the licensing terms for a couple of companies - one of them is Valve. Being interested in licensing Half-life 2, I contacted Valve to find out the price... the crap I've heard about thier commerical licensing terms are just that, crap. I'll be signing on licensing with 'em next week. If you license for 70 stations, it starts to get a little expensive. But if you are licensing for a bunch of machines, you should get a heck of a return out of it (considering how much time people will spend playing stuff like Counter-Strike) I also talked to Blizzard about thier products (and Worlds Of Warcraft, which they have no license set for yet) and again - people were full of it about the price. Blizzard has 1 year and 3 year agreements - when you start running the numbers on the costs, it's very reasonable. Blizzard I'll probably look at getting an agreement with here in the next two months or so (hopefully sometime before WoW comes out.

Now that I know all the costs involved in this place (labor, services, supplies, etc.) it's interesting that anyone bitches about the licensing costs. It's NOT that bad. You're making money from someone elses product, so why shouldn't they get a portion of what you make?

As for the center it's self - things are going great. I took over the "head honcho" position - I've got final say on everything, and am the person who determines our direction, and how best to execute upon it. There were some nearly fatal mistakes made that led to that change in management - I share them here, just so that ya' know what can go wrong:

1) No clear and solid leadership. The "money guy" was never here, and he was the "leader". Anyone who's a leader needs to be on the ball, and watching stuff like money. If you don't things and slip throught the cracks (for instance - in our case, the electric slipped through the cracks. Considering all our machines run on electricity, that's a show stopper :-)

2) No direction. Sure, there was a long term plan, and I had all of our short to mid term plans for marketing handled. But no one was looking at the big picture on how to bridge the gaps between the short term and the long term. You can't have a long term plan, and no clue how to get to that point (well, I'll amend that with - you can't have a long term plan laying around for over a month, and still no clue how to get there.)

3) Trust. It's impossible to build trust with management if they aren't there. It's pretty damned hard. Eventually, it will become an issue for Gamer Zone / Lightning Dog (what's that last part? Our secret weapon ;-) as we grow outside of the local area, and managers will become farther removed from the core. But if we're a stable and reasonable core, there isn't a whole lot of reason for a lack of trust. But in a startup? Trust is needed at all levels. Since the money man wasn't here, and the employees didn't deal with him, they had little trust in the situation. When I took over, they had already worked with me, and we had trust in each other. Now everyone at all levels are much happier (the money man is happier too - passing the reigns to someone he could trust to handle who was going to be right there handling it has freed him up to deal with his one core job, while everything else gets distributed out the way it should be.)

4) Clear communications. One problem that occured from time to time was unclear communications between management and the employees. If you need a job done, BE SURE that it's clearly communicated. We now have a Sunday meeting to discuss issues like communication between us (among other things - like marketing, which is now a deal where I've got the team working on pulling the information together, and then we set down and discuss it, then execute on it as a team rather than one guy trying to do it all.)

Obviously, an entire book could (and has many times already) been written on the subject of how to properly manage a company. I just picked the 4 that are the first and foremost obvious problems I had to address in Gamer Zone :-)

Before I get off of the subject of Gamer Zone (which isn't the entire subject for this .plan, just a large portion) One of the absolutely kick butt things that I've been having to do: Play games. As a developer, I rarely played that many games - but here, I've had the opportunity (actually, it's required) to play a lot more games, either to evaluate thier usefulness at the center (like Doom 3) or to make sure customers have a good experience (on rare occasion, we only have one player in here for thier first time, but no other customers to play multi-player games with) While it's fun and interesting, it allows me to be up close with a player, and discover what they really like and most importantly WHY that seems to be such a big deal with 'em. Understanding the target audience is always important, of course, if you want to sell games :-) This by no means makes me an expert, but getting to see into why certain single player games are more like than others is pretty cool. Seeing first hand how much difference playing across the Internet -vs- locally makes is also pretty cool. (BTW: Want to know what I play the most of right now? Gunbound, hands down.)

From time to time I get asked who I'm working with, professionally. I've made references to doing contract work, but never WHO I was working with. We decided not to say the who part of it until a project is almost complete. Guess what - the project is almost complete now, so I can reveal that I've been working with a company named Digital Snow.

Ok, now who the heck is Digital Snow, you ask? Umm... well, there's no good answer for that. They've been a Torque licensee for a bit now, and I've been working with them on multiple products. The first products they will be pushing out the door are going to be smaller, "easily" handled titles that head for more arcade styled gameplay. Later, they have plans for much larger products, but they want to build upon thier successes as they go. (Good plan!) I can't tell you want all they are up to over there, but, there's some interesting stuff in the works for the future.

What I can tell you about is thier first project: Marble Attack. The decision was made not to mention it at all until it's right at the point of ready to roll. Since I mention it... it's just about ready to roll :-) I'm having a brand new issue with compiling on the Mac (WTF?! I've compiled Torque on the Mac before, I have no idea why I now can't find lcrt1 properly when compiling - *SIGH*), so I'm getting that resolved. There's a few bugs left, but it getting pretty damned close to ready. Cody over at Digital Snow is setting up the website for it, and as soon as the product is ready to roll, a screenshot or two will be submitted to the Dev Snapshot.

But here's a quick synopsis of the game: You, playing the role of Captain SAF (Super Amazing Fantasic, BTW) are under attack by the "Marbles", a spheroid alien species bent on cutting the ol' Captains life way short the only way they know how - by rollin' right on over him. You're thrown into an arena (there's 10 different arenas, each with 5 different difficulty levels - arenas have to be unlocked, and when you beat a difficulty setting you unlock the next difficulty setting for the level) with just a blaster. Watch for the "marbles" who are carrying powerups (done with some simple particle fx) - shoot 'em, collect the powerups, and hopefully you'll be able to slow the attackers down for a while with rockets, shotguns, or the Armageddon bomb. (There's some more powerups too, like shield, invulnerability, and extra players.)

This is a VERY old-school arcade styled game where players are pitted with the ongoing stream of enemies that continue to show up faster and move faster as time goes on. While it's a 3D game, it keeps a lot of the 2D style simplicity by keeping most stuff on a single plane of action (though, there's ways to get above it all, litterally, by using the jump pads. You can't stay there long, and the marbles have no problems with using the Jump pads either!) Developing it has been a lot of fun, to tell you the truth - it was designed to be a short term project, and Cody used a team of people to get the job done (James, a modeler, and Eric Forhan did some of the GUI work and his City Pack appears in the game on one o' the levels), so it moved very quickly. Look for another .plan file about it sometime soon, along with the dev snapshot.

One of the awsome things about Marble Attack... it was short term. That means I was able to get in there, do the project, and soon I'll get back out of the project and it ships. I've been feeling bad about Trajectory Zone and some of the other projects that I've had planned, and the fact that they haven't gotten done. I've done games before, so it's not like I can't complete one. But I gotta say, I was starting to feel a little more like a "Game Developer Wannabie" rather than a Game Developer. I guess this also means without a doubt I've got something new to show off at IGC '04, even if it's something I developed for a different team, not my own.

I've mentioned before wanting to change how I do things with Midnight Ryder Technologies - basically, I never seem to quite have enough time to stay on top of all the things that I want to get done, and one of the biggies has always been: how the heck do I write games, and handle marketing at the same time? It can be done - other Indies have done it just fine. But now I've got my hands in another pie - that tears it, there's not enough time to pull it all off at the same time alone, and definitely not in an sort of timely fashion. Well, there's a solution: most likely in the near future, all or almost all Midnight Ryder Technologies games will go through Digital Snow for thier online publishing & marketing efforts. This takes at least one facet of game development out of my hands. While Digital Snow is new in the game development field, the owners are not new at online marketing - it makes for a pretty good fit.

But you'll notice that I said specifically Online Marketing. Gamer Zone, if things pan out as planned (and at the moment, even with the startup problems, it honestly looks like it probably will pan out as planned) allows me to do some really really interesting stuff. I mentioned one of them in my previous .plan file - I'm looking for Indie titles to load on the machines at Gamer Zone. This gives the Indies extra exposure, gives us content that is harder to find elsewhere, and personally gives me a bit of a warm fuzzy feeling being able to provide another cool channel to Indies.

It only took about two days after I got involved with Gamer Zone as the PR guy to see some very interesting possibilities. One was to get Indies in there on the machines. The second that I'll reveal now (oh, there's more interesting stuff off in the distant future - much of it way distant) is getting Indies on the shelves in Gamer Zone. "Huh?" you ask? Simple - Midnight Ryder Technologies is starting a publishing section that's geared towards Indie devs wanting to see thier product on real-world shelves in a nice little standard size box. I've mentioned this to a couple of people, with the disclaimer of "Thinking about", "Considering", or "don't hold me to this, but..." Gamer Zone, if it does what it's supposed to will be a perfect outlet. Right now, we're working on getting game sales in there using some interesting ways to keep our overhead low on inventory - and guess who was setting that up from the beginning? You got it. But I wanted to go further with it - I don't want to spend all my time competing with EB Games or Game Stop. I want to pick up three niches that are underserved at the moment - Indies, Mac, and Linux games. Sure, there will be Windows versions of everything too - not saying that I'm ignoring it. But in a number of towns, there is almost no where to buy a boxed game for Mac. And Linux? You might have well grown a third head based on the looks people give you if you ask if they sell stuff for Linux.

But how does one go about starting a publishing title like this? It took me quite a while to work out all the details (thus the reason why I'm finally mentioning it for the first time here in my .plan) to produce a realistic way to do it. At the moment, I'm not revealing all the details - this is one o' those rare occasions where isn't not a wise idea to show your cards until you play 'em. I can say, however, that it's going to be a very slow growth project, that ties in with Gamer Zone locations as we build 'em and stock them with games. As GZ grows, Midnight Ryder's publishing section will grow at the same pace. So when it starts, only 5 locations will be carrying the titles. Then 10 (as we do the next expansion ring), then as the real action starts (the national rollout) the publishing section will be pacing right with it. Provides a nice fit.

But why is Midnight Ryder Technologies starting a publishing section instead of a Gamer Zone branded publishing section? One, I pull in from two profit streams - Gamer Zone it's self (since I'm an owner), and Midnight Ryder Technologies. Two, at some point it may be possible that these games might show up in a different venue also, but I sort of doubt it - in Gamer Zone, I've got an almost exclusive channel that allowed me to turn the profit model on it's head (I like the 50/50 split model for spliting with game devs, and Gamer Zone will be selling them for a much lower profit margin than you would expect so that when a game sells it provides a much better profit stream for Indies than any of the normal real world publishing options.) Three, part of the deal is being able to allow people the choice of playing the game there at one of our machines (for a price) and deciding if this is something they want to take home.

Someone is bound to ask "Gee, when are you starting this?" Well, the answer is: "When it's ready." I need to get the next 5 Gamer Zone / Lightning Dogs open before I'm ready to do it. That's no small amount of effort, since I'm going to be building the startup team from scratch, like I did with the infrastructure team already, and then DO the next 2 GZ's myself with the startup team and train the GM on how he needs to be thinking to get them started up, etc., etc., etc. Takes time, and takes money.

Quick Aside: Oddly enough, the later is less of an issue than the former. I've already got a number of people interested in starting more GZ/LD combos in thier cities, ranging from areas in Kansas to places a number of states away. I don't want to see things rushed too fast - everything needs to be solid at all levels before I accept any of the offers out there right now. Things have to grow one step at a time :-)

I'm sure the next question would be "Who can get in the channel?" Well, it still intended to make money, and it still requires that games meet certain criteria (for instance - Boulder Panic! 2 DX would never make it into the channel, in my mind. It's too hacky, there's no Mac or Linux version, and it's way past it's prime graphically. On the flip side - it's fun.) and I just happen to have this really interesting channel at my fingertips that allows me to put a game in front of people and get thier opinions on the subject. If it can pass the Gamer Zone test (IE - people who play it have fun, enjoy the game, think it's a cool deal, etc.) then it would move on to the next step in the process. (And, as you could guess, the first time I start a game through the process, I'm going to be documenting it in my .plan file, just so people can see what my criteria would be using a set of real world examples.)

Of course - there's a risk here. Gamer Zone COULD always flop, or never reach it's final vision, leaving the publishing stuff high and dry. Thus some of the time I spend strategizing the concept - reduce my risk, reduce the risk to the game developer (no exclusive contracts - that way, if something goes wrong, they can still take it elsewhere), and reduce the risk to Gamer Zone it's self.

Yep, I'm sure at least a few people will think I'm completely insane because of the publishing thing :-) But why wouldn't I try and make as much use as possible of Gamer Zone to foster independant game development while making another profit stream? And here's an interesting question - if I own my own publishing group, does that mean I'm no longer an Indie? :-/

An obvious choice for publishing in this channel would be my own games too. Why screw with another real world publisher when I can just throw it in my own channel, and probably give the online portion over to Digital Snow? What about those games though? No one has seen a new version of Trajectory Zone in quite a while. Well, for now, put TZ out of your mind until it shows up in a dev snapshot here on GG. I really can't say much about it anymore at this point - with the contracts going on, and Gamer Zone, it's pretty obvious I'm not going to be completing it anytime soon. On the other hand, it's also not at a standstill either - it's just going to be outside of public view for a while. For that matter - most of the projects that I'll be working on for the short term will be outside of public view, besides Gamer Zone. Some of these are because of the requirements put on them by others (IE - hey, let's not tell anyone about this until we're just about ready to reveal it in a bigger fashion), and some because I can't decide on where I want to go with it (Boulder Panic! 3, for instance, is a very cool little prototype. After everything I've learned about games and player motivation while with Gamer Zone, I'm rethinking how large portions of it work to better fit the model of what's exciting to the players. Have I ever mentioned that Gamer Zone may be the second best thing that ever happened to me, Game Development wise? IGC '02 still ranks as #1 at the moment)

Another interesting game related thing is about my wife - she's very close to finishing her double major in Psychology and Sociology. She's now at the point where she's got to start writing research projects on various subjects. Gamer Zone ends up being one of those projects now. This should be interesting - my wife will be writing about the company that I run, in a very very critical fashion. I've told her to tell me everything she observes - I don't hate critisizm, and I want to see the place improve considerably. It's just really strange how Heather and myself picked pathes that allowed this particular thing to happen, and how much I stand to benefit from it.

Ok, I'm not done raving about my new toy - you see, this incredibly long .plan file was a result of the fact that I can be anywhere, and whip out my Powerbook and work on stuff. So from time to time, I'd pull it out and type a paragraph, and then go back to whatever I was doing (eating, programming, talking on the phone with the money guy, etc.) The powerbook may turn out to be one of my better investments in recent memory. The only thing missing - I need The Journal for the Mac, so I can keep my notes the way I like 'em best.

Based on all of the above - you can see why I haven't updated my .plan for a while, and why this one ended up being such a monster. Oddly enough, I tried to write a .plan when I was on vacation, just to say I was alive, and for some reason I could never get a .plan to gel. Too many things were just too up in the air at the time, and I think my plan would have ended up being about three lines line - "I'm alive, doing well, thanks for reading my plan, see you later." :-)

Hopefully next .plan I'll have another semi-exciting item to throw in here, along with game pics. Now that everyone is done with their cuppa after reading this massive tome o' blathering, get back to work guys - games don't write themselves, ya know! ;-)

Friday Jul 9 5:53

Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr — 2004-07-09T05:53:10+00:00

The continuing story of Gamer Zone, my wife goes back to work?!, why one should never bother going to bed early, and Indie phone calls. Oh, and game development too ;-) All in this weeks spine-tingling .plan file!

I should never bother trying to go to be early. I'm writing this after chatting on IRC way too late (and getting too absorbed in the conversation again) after handling business email, and getting the framework for a new (contract) game up and running. Always seems when ever I try, I end up finding 1.5 million things that need to all be done, all Right Friggin' Now. And of course, I should probably never be logged into IRC during something like that, otherwise I run the chance of an interesting conversation happening :-) And for some strange reason... I was suddenly compelled to do another .plan file. Oh well - no need for sleep, I'll just be doing PR work in the morning ;-)

Yep, I'm still dealing with Gamer Zone related stuff off and on now - the place is open, our first ad went out (which I thought was a bit ugly, but, I only had something like 8 hours without benefit of sleep to do. Oddly enough, it looked much better in print than it did in Illistrator.) But since the construction and opening phase of the place is done, things on that front has slown down to a reasonable pace. Thank goodness for that :-) (Actually, there's one construction related item still being worked on at a slow pace - the bathroom. We have the coolest bathroom in Wichita, KS - it gets a LOT of comments already. I mentioned it in the last .plan, but, when it's complete I'll post a picture of it. It's damned cool! My wife is very creative :-)

Josh Ritter brough up an intersting question when I posted the pictures of the LAN center. (And continued in an almost accusatory tone in IRC for that matter.) If you are thinking of opening a LAN center by just throwing some machines in a room, going down to CompUSA and buying some games... don't. You've gotta license it for LAN center play. This isn't a simple process either (though, it should be noted that I'm not in charge of licensing, except for Indie titles.) Different companies have different licensing requirements, and some games are REALLY expensive, and some games just plain CANNOT be used in a LAN center. That's not just talking about PC games either - same goes for the console games and the consoles themselves. All of it has to be licensed. We have a selection of about a dozen PC games - simply put, that's all we can afford to license at this time :-)

This also increases the expense of each of the GamerZone's that we open (this is Gamer Zone #1) I think some of the licensing requirements are a little too high, but, that's from the perspective of someone putting one in, not from the perspective of the guys who wrote the software :-) And iGames does help with some of that - but, it isn't a magic bullet that makes all of the licensing issues go away. I would REALLY love to see some standardization of the licenses for cybercafe's - but I'm just dreaming, it won't happen anytime soon. What would I like to see as a standard? Oh, a CyberCafe licensed version of all games - make the cafe version something like twice the cost of a single copy of the game, and you've got to buy one version for each machine in the place. Yes - the developer is going to loose some money in sales, I think - each customer who spends all thier timeon a game is probably going to not buy it, thus the doubled cost to help aleviate that a bit. (I found it interesting that some of the people who are showing up for our first tourny already own copies of the game - but playing it in person for a competion is great for them, even if they have to pay!) But as it stands now... as Gamer Zone grows, eventually there will probably end up being one person who's entire job will be to negotiate licenses, and check each site for compliance (what a job - go from site to site to do onsite checks of license compliance. But given how much it could cost to get sued, it's probably worth it.)

So, my wife is now retired. It took exactly two days for her to get an offer she couldn't refuse. The only issue is WHEN the job starts - along with Gamer Zone is a second phase to the plan that feeds Gamer Zone's pockets along with it's own. This is resteraunt type stuff - something Heather and I had always wanted to get into. However, I'm not really involved in this project - I'll help get the first store running from a construction standpoint, but after that, I'm out of it. I was there for the meeting that let up to the job offer, and was asked if I was also interested, and I had to flatly turn it down. I'm tapped on the resources (time and brainpower) nessisary to do much to help out. So, I guess this won't really be a completely Indie house after all.

One of the things I've been having fun with lately is that anymore I get a phone call about once a week from the group that I'm doing contract work for. This isn't a "where are you at on things" phone call either - a lot of it is marketing, development, etc. strategy talks - how do we build this, then how the heck to do we get it to sell. More and more I've been considering setting up a time to do the same sort of thing with other Indies - maybe not a conference call, but, using something like Teamspeak or similar (preferable inexpensive / free, crossplatform application - suggestions? :-) online to get everone who's interested to get together once a week, and just shoot the breeze about Indie game development. There would probably be a suggested topic, and we'd make a little effort to actualyl stick to the topic, but I'm sure it would ramble off course from time to time (just like every conversation ;-)

But - if IRC is there, why do something via voice? IRC only communicates so much - even the phone can't replace face to face meetings, but, there's a lot that you hear in a person's voice (like Nicolas's froggy accent ;-) that doesn't come across on IRC. And it always feels more... natural to talk voice to someone rather than online.

Anyone else game for such a thing? If so - what time(s) / day(s) work best for you so something could be coordinated for a weekly Indie Chat Session.

Damnit, I'm hyped about a game again. Sure, it's not my design, but, it's a cool concept... the Mystery Contractor who's provided me money and phone calls has a game concept I like (actually, I did contribute some to the concept also, but the core is thiers). The art resources are already getting completed, and I'm starting on the core programming for it. I'll tell more about the project, but, I mention the game because it's short (VERY short dev time - it was engineered from the ground up to be a short development cycle), and will be a lot of fun to work on. We had a phone conversation today about it, and what we wanted to do, what the schedule of art resource were, and to get the final "Go!" for it :-) Look for a screenshot probably next week :-)

Is your spine tingling? Well, it's not because of the .plan file - you need to get up and walk around a bit, you've been setting too long or have too much caffeene in your system :-)

-=-=-
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr
Owner, Midnight Ryder Technologies
"Push to test." "Release to detonate."

Saturday Jul 3 7:42

Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr — 2004-07-03T07:42:43+00:00

Ah, life is good again. Pushing forward on the PR "job" I picked up, The household is now completely Indie, I got my money, and more in this issue of the Continuing Saga Of The Elusive Indie, part Umpteen!

For a while, I was starting to get a bit uptight. Ya see, I did a medium sized contracting job for game development, and one for some industrial automation work. Both of my customers decided we would all try out a different way of doing things - instead of the usual bill, wait 30 days, get check cycle, we'd just do a credit card transaction.

The first transaction was on the 19th, and the second was on the 20th. That's not JUNE 19th either - this was a month and a half ago. Every possible thing that could go wrong did - lightning may not strike twice, but Captain Murphy sure as hell does! After lots of struggle, many MANY phone calls, various pieces of documentation faxed back and forth, and me jumping thier case every couple o' days, it's finally over and I have my money.

But it gets even better... that money has shown up in my account, and now I find out that one of the customers that's been holding out on me for 6 months is going to finally pay his bills. Oh, thank ye gods - another thing I can take off the books. And, well, more money in the bank. And there's a couple more bills that I need to send out (that were still on hold until we resolved the inital credit card payment situation - just in case it had to be chargedback and a regular check cut or something strange like that.)

My wife is quitting her job. All I can say is "About friggin' time!" Her job has always sucked. It's 3rd shift. It doesn't pay a lot. And it's somewhat dangerous (She works at a level 6 juvenile detention facuility here in Wichita). That does mean, however, that this is a completely "Indie" household - whatever gets made money wise comes through my company. That would be scary, except we had been trying to reduce our debt load and streamline our lives - so when she quit, we didn't need nearly as much money as when I was working a full time job making $42k / year. I suppose I should be scared to death at the prospect of my piddly little game company being the only source of income. And to tell you the truth, I was for a bit. Then we did the math, and realized how little I had to make. Not bad. Of course, at some point I need to get down to the business of selling games, rather than doing contract work. But that's ok - a lot of the contract work I've been doing is really enjoyable, and at least one item I'll be reselling on my website as another channel for it.

But after the contract work is done - it's time to buckle down. TZ is going to be sold online. Eric and I did some playing one night with the demo version of Trajectory Zone - we managed to reduce it from a 200MB project to a 14MB project without sacrificing any quality. I'll be taking another shot at it, and try to get it down to just below 10 MB - I think it's possible, since we've mapped out places where savings could be made still.

After that - I'll be all over The Uber-Secret Master Plan :-) I've also got a couple of other irons in the fire, but, how much any of them pan out is anyones guess at this point.

One of those irons that is beinging to pan out is GamerZone - the local LAN gaming center that I became the PR guy for (well, it should probably be called something like Marketing Manager or similar, since it's gone way beyond just sending out press releases or talking to people.) I just thew a dev shot up of GamerZone, but, who knows if it's really topical enough to get posted (I have my doubts :-) If it doesn't, I'll throw it in my next .plan file.

What's cool is that it's already generating excitement - we have people interested in getting Gamer Zone's done from exactly the same model in thier town. Which is really the plan - this is Gamer Zone #1. Of course, I really can't say much about the what / when / where / who / etc. of the other Gamer Zones until they happen. But this turned out to be a bit more exciting of a deal than I planned on. What's also interesting is that I was informed by the owner that I was being cut in on a part of the action.

Unluckly, we had some construction problems hold things up - namely, the building wasn't ready. It needed painting on the outside (the owner, manager, and I painted it last week, so that's out of the way), a new counter built (I did that) and a multitude of little odds and ends that needed fixing. So, Heather and I have spent a lot of time over there with tools, getting the place in shape (same goes for Greg the manager). Which is great - I was being forced to be a little more "active" again rather than being the slug that I've become recently (spending all day in a chair doing business with no start or end time except "when I'm tired, I sleep" does NOT do good things to a person's physical well being!) It's all done except for a little more paint on the back of the building, and the bathroom (which is Heather's area. She isn't just redoing the bathroom. She's turning it into a work of art. When it's complete, I'm going to take a couple o' pictures and post 'em in my next .plan. While it might seem odd to be posting pictures of a bathroom, this thing involves blacklights, electroluminescent wire, classic games, etc. It's not what you'd expect in a public restroom. Or a private one either! ;-)

You'll probably be hearing more and more about GamerZone in future .plans - I'm using it as a marketing vehicle for my projects too. And possibly for someone else's projects (the company I've been doing contract game dev work for). Sure, getting my games in one little LAN gaming center doesn't make a lot of difference. But, one little LAN center isn't thier plan :-)

Bryan Edds and I started doing a collaborative project a while back, and due to various things, that went by the wayside for a while. Well, Bryan is back, and we've spent a little time over the last two days working out the plotline for the game in question. A nice, short term game (which barely deserves a plot, but, it does help to explain what the player's goals and motivations are). But there's something different about working on the project - I'm not getting my hands "dirty" with code for the most part. Instead, my job is to be the producer / manager for the project. This should be fun - I'll be keeping an off and on log of what happens with this project just like I did with TZ, and post it online when the whole thing is done (I think that's just going to be a continuing thing anyway - release game, then release a post mortem for anyone who's interested in finding out what went right / wrong, and what I walked away learning from the experience.)

Ok, nuff of my babble for now. Hope everone enjoyed thier tea / coffee break while the read this ;-)

-=-=-
Davis Ray Sickmon, Jr
Owner, Midnight Ryder Technologies
http://www.midnightryder.com
Baby philosophy: If it stinks, change it.